Precarious city: home-making and eviction in Buenos Aires,Argentina

Buenos Aires, Argentina

The case study of women migrant squatters living in the built environment of Buenos Aires offers a particular context to understanding urban precarity. Buenos Aires is an important destination for Latin American immigrants because it offers economic opportunities and a relatively better quality of life than in their places of origin. Migrant women arriving from Peru, Paraguay, and other Latin American countries can easily find work as maids or in factories. ¹¹ Yet, renting an apartment in the city is practically impossible even with some source of stable income. In addition to the required documents and upfront costs, real estate and rent prices have risen steadily since 2001, making it increasingly difficult for even the middle class to find formal housing in the city. ¹²

Since the early 1990s, neoliberal policies and economic regimes have exacerbated the social and spatial marginalization and inequality of the city. ¹³ From 2001 to 2006 alone, the number of people living in informal housing throughout the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires increased from 650,000 to 1.14 million. ¹⁴ Inside the city-limits it is estimated that roughly ten percent of the population lives in some form of informal housing. ¹⁵ Although most are located in slum neighborhoods in the Southern areas of the city, the residents in this study were living in the city center, inside informal hotels, locally known as casas tomadas. These are empty buildings that have been reappropriated as informal hotels, in which entire families live in one bedroom and share a kitchen, bathroom, and common areas with other tenants, often as they wait to be evicted. ¹⁶ The crowded and run-down conditions of these buildings require residents to constantly negotiate access to shared spaces and resources. At the same time, their informal character also means that violence, illicit activities and a general sense of insecurity and uncertainty about the future often prevail.

Women, in particular, bear the brunt of this precarious housing regime, since the traditionally gendered character of housing and home means that they become responsible for mitigating daily challenges and struggles. In many ways, the precarious conditions of casas tomadas both produce and reinforce women’s identities and roles as mothers, wives, and caretakers. ¹⁷ Women not only assume the tasks of taking care of their families through cooking, cleaning, and caring for children but also they are put in the taxing position of constantly negotiating access to spaces inside casas tomadas and mediating chronic precarity from their position as women, mothers, and caretakers.

Framing precarity

The concept of precarity has generally been reserved for research concerned with neoliberal labor markets and practices. ¹⁸ European scholarship, in particular, has employed precarity to address the many consequences of deindustrialization and neoliberalization of labor regimes. ¹⁹ Whereas Anderson ²⁰ identifies precarity as a ‘structure of feeling’ that emerges in the aftermath of the 2008 recession, other scholars have described it as a ‘generalized societal malaise’ ²¹ that is representative of the 21st century, and particularly of the post-9/11 era. ²² Others employ the concept to describe a condition grounded in specific political and economic structures representative of the post-fordist turn to neoliberalism in the 21st century. ²³ Precarity itself is not necessarily new; ²⁴ however, it has become increasingly normalized as part and parcel with the current socio-economic, political, and cultural order.

These approaches notwithstanding, little has been written about the everyday material and symbolic manifestations of chronic precarity, particularly in the context of housing and home. This work contributes to this literature through an examination of the ways that conditions of precarity are experienced through habitual home-making practices. This particular conceptualization draws on Wise’s notion of home-making as routine practices and iterations that produce and represent cultural spaces and meanings. ²⁵ Through this approach, this article presents precarity as a condition that elicits particular experiences and as such, ways of being, that, in turn, reinforce and normalize these conditions. Precarity as a condition is an abstraction, it is the material and practical ways it is done or experienced and within the specific spaces where these experiences occur, that produce meaning.

In this context, precarity is identified and analyzed through its spatial and temporal manifestations. Tsianos and Papadopoulis ²⁶ have suggested that precarity operates at the level of time, ‘exploiting the continuum of everyday life’. ²⁷ More recently, scholarship on how the poor are forced to wait has documented the destabilizing effects of uncertain waiting and its use as a form of subordination and control over a population. ²⁸ In Pascalian Meditations, Bourdieu ²⁹ explains, ‘Time is really only experienced when the quasi-automatic coincidence between expectations and chances, expectations and the world which is there to fulfill them, is broken’. ³⁰ This notion of ‘broken time’ offers a framework for understanding how precarity is produced and experienced. In Patients of the State, Javier Auyero’s work illustrates how, through the production of temporal precarity and uncertainty, the state manufactures ‘subjects who know, and act accordingly, . . . when dealing with state bureaucracies’. ³¹ He explains, ‘[H]abitual exposure to long delays molds a particular submissive set of dispositions among the urban poor’. ³² Auyero’s research on waiting illustrates how precarity is produced by the state, its institutions, and the individuals who represent it through routine practices, as well as policies that keep the urban poor submissive or in their place.

In the context of home-making, Wise employs the notion of habit to argue that ‘[i]t is through habits that we are brought into culture in a very fundamental way. We cultivate habits, they are encultured. Culture is a way of behaving, or territorializing’. ³³ These discussions around habit and time help to frame the question: what happens then, when urban residents engage in habitual practices of home-making in the context of extreme precarity and uncertainty?

Inside casas tomadas mundane activities like using the bathroom, preparing food, taking a shower, having and providing privacy and safety, and protecting children from certain spaces and things take on different meaning and greatly impact and mark women migrant squatters’ daily lives. The task of waiting for eviction, while having to routinely negotiate access to time and space, without clear knowledge of the outcome, is a manifestation of the precarious conditions under which these women and their families live.

These conceptualizations of home and identity contribute to an analysis of how precarity is both embodied and embedded in what Ettlinger calls, the ‘microspaces of everyday life’, ³⁴ the empirical, localized routine practices that are a result of chronic, long-term precarity. ³⁵ An exploration of routine home-making practices further exposes the spatialized experiences of precarity, as well as its impact on the production of gender and identity. In her work on the right to the city, Fenster ³⁶ focuses on the home as a gendered space that is also representative of a larger experience of urban precarity and the broader struggle for the right to the city. ³⁷ She argues that ‘home can be a contested space for women’ and therefore, ‘the discussion around the right to use public spaces and the right to participate in decision-making must begin at the home scale’. ³⁸ Similarly, Wardhaugh ³⁹ focuses on the ways that spaces are interpreted and given meaning through the gendered and embodied experiences of women. She argues that home and homelessness are not mutually exclusive and refers to the ‘complex and shifting experiences and identities’ that occur in distinct spaces. ⁴⁰ The ways in which women experience the city begin at the scale of the home and are continuously reinforced and reconstructed at the different spaces and scales of the city.

Methods

This work is based on qualitative and ethnographic research conducted in Buenos Aires, Argentina over a 10-month period in 2009. I was able to gain access into seven casas tomadas and to create relationships with many of the residents through my affiliation with the housing organization, Coordinadora de Inquilinos de Buenos Aires (CIBA). ⁴¹ The casas tomadas were privately owned, and all were located in and around the traditionally working-class neighborhood of Abasto, in the center of the city. Since the late 1990s, Abasto has experienced gentrification through what Janoschka and Sequera ⁴² describe as the commodification and repackaging of Argentina’s tango-heritage for tourism purposes. During the same period, however, Abasto has remained one of the neighborhoods with the highest percentage of informal housing in the city and a destination for many Peruvians and other Latin American migrants trying to live inside the city center. ⁴³

Field research was primarily conducted through participant observation and semi-formal interviews with 25 women residents. Interviews focused on their personal and collective experiences and daily lives inside casas tomadas. All of the interviews were conducted after I had already established some kind of relationship and rapport with each interviewee. In most cases, I was able to interview the women inside their homes – crowded bedrooms filled with their belongings piled high across each wall. Most of the women were mothers or caretakers of younger children or family members. The majority worked as servants in the homes of wealthy Argentine families. The women had come to Argentina because, as they explained, job, health care, and education options available in Argentina offered possibilities unattainable in Peru. Throughout the rest of this article, I show how precarity is pervasive, gendered, and temporally and spatially experienced, as women assume most of the responsibility of the routine struggles to create a home space amidst habitual uncertainty and instability, as well as the threat of eviction and possible displacement from the city.

Gardel the Terrible

Residents develop routine practices and strategies that allow them to address or at least cope with their living situation. These practices include, residents’ collaboration with others to obtain certain benefits, the use of their bodies and possessions to access spaces and control time, and distancing themselves from conflicts occurring inside the houses. In most cases, these are mundane, habitual acts, but their effects are crucial for ensuring that basic, everyday needs are met. ⁴⁴ These occur in the context of daily and immediate spatial, temporal, and material needs, and are negotiated and carried out primarily by women in their roles as mothers and caretakers.

Gardel was a casa tomada known for its large population and small, run-down spaces. There were approximately 150 residents, primarily consisting of young families and older women and couples from Peru, Paraguay, and Northern Argentina. It was a highly precarious, complex, and contentious place where residents experienced conflict, violence, and instability, as well as some sense of community and support, and where everyone tried to build and maintain some kind of stable home space for themselves and their families. When I started my field research, the legal case for eviction had already lasted for over three years, and it was still unclear when eviction would occur. ⁴⁵

Gardel was a wide, four-story, red brick building with small, symmetrical windows in the front and a small, thin metal door that marked the entrance. Once inside there was a dark hallway and the sudden smell of fried food and other unidentifiable odors and sounds. The walls were painted a pale green and gray and after years of neglect, much of it was chipped off and covered with mold and cobwebs. Each floor had approximately 15–18 bedrooms. The rooms in Gardel were small and box-like with low ceilings and measuring about (eight × twelve ft). Entire families, sometimes up to four or five people, lived in one bedroom and used it for all of their activities – eating, sleeping, studying, preparing food, playing, and watching television – as well as storing all of their belongings. If they left anything outside, they ran the risk of having it stolen. Bunk beds offered families some additional space to sleep, work, move around, and store their belongings. Beds and bed frames were usually full of people’s things and at night might hold two or three people to a bed.

Many of the residents had gone to great lengths to fix their rooms for themselves and their family despite the run-down conditions and the imminent threat of eviction. Some had refrigerators, televisions, DVD players, and personal computers. In a few of the rooms, I was able to see air units hanging from the walls. Residents accessed cable television through a neighbor who charged each family AR$15 pesos (US$3.00) a month to connect to his service. They also had electricity, water, and gas that they paid bi-monthly. Each floor had a person who collected money for the bills, although some of the residents rarely paid, forcing others to make up the amount or putting the entire house at risk of non-payment.

The constant and inherent need to rely on others outside of the family unit in order to ‘get things done’ alters the more traditional dynamics of the immediate family. The everyday is formulated around relying on ‘strangers’ in order to retain one’s home and to ensure domestic responsibilities can be carried out. This can be frustrating because there is not always a collective understanding or shared objective among the families, and as I show later on, there is little trust. The urbanist, Abdoumaliq Simone ⁴⁶ describes a similar condition in his work on African cities:

There is a preoccupation on the part of many residents . . . with the extent to which they are tied to the fates of others they witness ‘sinking’ all around them. At the same time, they hope that the ties around them are sufficiently strong to rescue them if they need be. ⁴⁷

Uncertainty, coupled with daily reliance on and mistrust of others, creates an enormous pressure that both weighs on and transforms traditional family dynamics. Due primarily to traditionally gendered roles, women, in particular, feel the impact of this precarity, as they become the public figures and mediators, charged with negotiating access to shared spaces and resources inside casas tomadas.

‘Broken’ time

Residents of casas tomadas are deeply aware of time, because they are constantly forced to negotiate their time and space with other inhabitants, without any clear assurance of the outcome. Very little can be anticipated inside casas tomadas: will a burner be free when I get home? Will I be able to take a shower without anyone bothering me? How long will I have to wait to use the bathroom? Will I be able to use the bathroom without interruption? Will I be able to sleep through the night without being disturbed? Will the eviction occur this week? All of these questions are constantly uttered, and rarely do residents have an answer, highlighting how for residents of casas tomadas precarity is produced and reinforced through routine temporal uncertainty or ‘broken time’.

In Gardel, negotiating access to the kitchen in order to make a meal for one’s family involved routine strategies and interactions among the women in the houses. The kitchen is the size of a long and narrow walk-in closet. The water heater is at one end, and there are six small burners connected to a gas outlet. The outlets are old and badly connected, and it is common to smell gas and frying meat at night when walking past the kitchen. Residents negotiate their access to the kitchen through spatial strategies and interactions that employ different objects and time management in order to prepare meals for themselves and their family, as Sara explains below.

In order to find a free burner . . . the kettles boil, they boil. From the morning to the afternoon, they boil the water and then they throw it out, and then they boil more water. Why? So at 12 o’clock in the afternoon they have a burner to cook on. Do you have a burner for the day? Well then, you’re as happy as a clam. But if you don’t have a burner and you get home at 12 to make lunch for your family, well then you have to wait and you have to ask someone, ‘when you are done cooking will you give me your burner?’ They say, give me your kettle. And when they are done cooking they yell, ‘Sara, I put your kettle on the burner!’

As Sara’s story highlights, residents attempt to control time and the use of spaces and resources in the way they employ objects, like in the use of a simple kettle. This often involves an important degree of negotiation, planning, and energy with respect to accessing a burner to cook food. It also involves juggling food, utensils, and bowls from place to place, which adds to the time and energy of preparing a simple meal. Families cut and prepare all the ingredients in their bedroom as they wait for a burner to free up so that they can prepare lunch or dinner for themselves and their children.

This constant and routine temporal uncertainty of living in a casa tomada weighs on the women in terms of the strategies and the time they employ to counter daily hardships. As primary caretakers, women develop strategies and practices that allow them to make living in a casa tomada a less precarious experience, often using their own bodies, things, and practices as obstacles or buffers. Sara’s kettle is a material depiction of her attempt to establish a sense of home and reinforce her territoriality and identity as a homemaker for her family despite the precarious circumstances under which they live.

Similarly, Sara tried to shield her young cousins from some of the daily challenges of negotiating access to space and time by using her body and presence as a buffer:

[T]he bathroom is next to the kitchen, so if someone turns on the kitchen sink the water in the shower stops working. It is horrible to be standing in the shower with shampoo and soap, and it is four degrees outside and someone starts using the kitchen sink. What do you do? It only happened to me one time. I would always try and take a quick shower every one or two days. It never happened to my little cousins, because since it happened to me I would always stand at the door when they were showering and take care of them. I would wait outside and say, ‘Oh, please can you wait to wash your plates because my cousin is taking a shower?’ And they would say, ‘Oh ok, will you let me know when your cousin is done?’ So my cousin would finish showering, then the other one would go in, and then I would take both of them upstairs.

These daily events create a context in which women’s things, their roles as both caretaker and homemaker, their bodies, and the strategic ways they choose to interact with fellow residents are all employed in order to control routine situations of precarity, uncertainty, and crisis.

Struggling to make a home

In many ways, women’s roles as mothers and heads of family are the very reason that they struggle to find a place to live in the city. As single women who have just arrived to Buenos Aires, they have no problems finding a place to live in a boarding house or hotel. However, when they are finally able to bring their family to Buenos Aires from their place of origin, or when they are married and start to have children, they are suddenly excluded from most formal and informal housing options inside the city. Many of the hotels where they lived when single refuse to rent rooms to entire families, especially those with small children. Sonia, a Peruvian woman who was married and had two small children, explained,

I looked a lot so that [my family] could stay in the city and not move [outside the city]. My son would say to me, ‘Oh mom! Just give me away because I am the problem, it’s my fault that no one wants to rent you an apartment’.

Another woman, Rocio, arrived from Peru to Buenos Aires in 2005. She came to the city for work because she and her husband were having a hard time making ends meet. At first, she worked as a live-in maid in a big house in San Isidro, an exclusive neighborhood north of the city. Then she lived in a hotel in downtown Buenos Aires with her sister. Later, when her son and husband were going to arrive she had to find another place to live, but was having a difficult time because no one wanted to rent to an entire family. When she finally found a room for the three of them, the ceiling drooped and leaked when it rained, and the manager was always complaining about them and controlling how long they took to shower, but they remained because it was all that was available.

Rocio’s situation is very common: with few options, residents will pay what they can and move where they can. Increasingly desperate, poor urban dwellers engage in many types of living arrangements. For example, Sara arrived from Peru to Buenos Aires in 2006 with her aunt Violet and two nephews. Since then, she has always lived in casas tomadas, mainly because her Aunt Elena has four young children, making it difficult for them to rent a room in a family hotel. Her story below demonstrates the desperation of finding a place to live and the social and spatial relationships that residents will enter into in order to stay in the city:

Someone told my aunt that there was a building on the corner of Pueyrredón and LaValle where they were selling rooms. My aunt mentioned this and we went to check the room out. It was enormous! We got lost in that room it was so big and beautiful! And it had this amazing balcony! And it was on the third floor! The building didn’t have any water except on the first floor and we thought, ‘Well, if we’re on the third floor we don’t have to go up too many stairs and the water isn’t too far away, it’s feasible . . . ’ But we couldn’t afford it, because they wanted AR$1000 pesos for the room (US$400) and we didn’t have it and we needed to pay immediately! So my aunt talked to one of her neighbors from the hotel where she was living, and asked her if she wanted to split the room and share the space for the time being. And the woman agreed. So my aunt bought the room, splitting it with the woman and her daughter. We put up a curtain in the middle of the room. But soon after, she brought her cousin, her aunt, her brother in law and her brother! There were twelve of us living in that room! With six people it was ok, but twelve? We didn’t know what to do, but what could we say? Half of the room was hers! You know what I mean? It’s her property! I do what I want on my property and you can do what you want on your property . . . with a curtain dividing everything. We lived there for nine months. We moved in July and we were evicted in April.

Sara’s story highlights how poor urban residents move from one form of spatial precarity to another, even as they try to resolve their housing situation. Sara and her family were able to find a place to live, but as a result, they entered into another precarious arrangement, transforming what was originally meant to be a solution to an urgent problem into a complex and often contentious situation to which Sara and her family were bound. Sara lamented,

[With twelve] there were too many of us. That is why we had [originally] bought the room with this woman, because there were only two of them. That was basically the idea, but she kept bringing more and more people.

Sara’s account is one example of how families – often, single mothers and their extended family – negotiate precarious temporal, spatial, and material conditions by pooling resources. It also highlights the long-term effects of collective decision making in moments of urgency, and how original agreements and resolutions transform overtime, often leading to new situations of crisis and precarity. Similarly, it demonstrates how, even as residents try to control and resolve situations of crisis, and to make a home, precarity is pervasive in the daily lives and spaces of these urban dwellers. Simone ⁴⁴ describes a similar condition in which ‘the experience of crisis [is] dissipated in that there is no normality to refer to, no feeling of something unraveling’. ⁴⁸ Stated differently, the precarious and unstable state of living in a casas tomada becomes the normalized condition of the home and the everyday.

Conflicts and contestation

The interactions between residents of casas tomadas were always grounded in their reluctant need to get along in order to get things done and mistrust because of their shared precarity and the confusion it created. At the same time, these were collective spaces, organized in ways or moments that offered some sense of community among the residents. Inside the houses, women focused on maintaining stable aspects of relationships with other residents while filtering out the more disruptive and problematic elements of living in a casa tomada. This often meant staying out of domestic disputes, ignoring the selling of drugs and other illicit practices, and responding in ways that avoided further igniting conflict with other residents. Residents remained quiet because it was too risky and as Gloria seems to suggest below, futile, to get involved:

They fight, bam, bam and I just shut the door, and I don’t get involved. When they drink, or there are problems because someone lent someone money, or because they didn’t give it back, or because she slept with her husband, or because he stole . . . that is why people fight. You get involved and the next day they are kissing and making up and you look bad. I got involved once, there was a young couple, and the girl was tiny. They had children and the husband was always beating her up. So one day I went and screamed at him, ‘Hit me, hit me you asshole!’ The girl was crying . . . Well after three or four days everything was the same. Just the other day he hit her again . . . I don’t get involved.

Domestic violence was common inside casas tomadas, despite the collective and crowded character of these spaces. Like Gloria, most of the residents tried to ignore the violence or control it in subtle ways. Wardhaugh, ⁴⁹ Brickell, ⁵⁰ and other home scholars have challenged more conventional understandings of the home as a safe space, demonstrating, instead, how the home space is also one that reinforces gender repression and violence. ⁵¹ In his work on evictions, Desmond ⁵² has shown how the inability to access stable housing and the threat of eviction keep women in abusive relationships. With no stable place to go, women and their neighbors are hard-pressed to keep quiet, or risk eviction and further retaliation from other residents, police, or landlords.

Residents also often remain quiet when their belongings are lost or stolen, a common occurrence inside casas tomadas. Another example of spatial and temporal precarity, women know that if they hang their clothes to dry on the roof that they need to keep an eye out, so that no one steals anything. Thus, most people generally keep all of their belongings in their bedroom in order to ensure that nothing is stolen. Families also spend a lot of time and effort watching out for their things. As Sonia explained,

[We share] the bathroom, the kitchen and the patio where we hang clothes out to dry. But you have to keep an eye out because if you aren’t careful they take your clothes, so I am always there watching. The last time I had to clean the bathroom . . . because I have to clean two times a month. I arrived at night, so in the morning at 5 am I take my cloth and my detergent and start cleaning, but then I came back to the room to give my daughter her milk and when I returned my detergent wasn’t there anymore. Just like that! Not twenty minutes and only three neighbors had gone in to the bathroom. I suspected that it was one woman and everyone else said, yeah, it is probably her, but what can you do? Nothing. You don’t really know who it is and who it isn’t. It’s gone. That’s it.

Sonia’s conclusion is one that I heard often from the women I interviewed. Stealing was a common occurrence and one that I think most residents accepted as simply part of their living arrangements. In another hotel, Sara also complained about how her clothes had gone missing: ‘I’ve lost a raincoat, a towel, my aunt Violet’s sweatshirt and no one knows who it is! We don’t know! I can’t say anything to anyone because I don’t know who it is!’

Like the other forms of precarity and confusion that characterize the reality inside a casa tomada, the stealing of residents’ things had important effects on the internal dynamic and morale of the residents inside the houses. Residents remain quiet because they have no choice. Without proof, if they accuse someone of stealing, they run the risk of disrupting the shared existence of a house’s internal dynamic and delicate sense of community. It means that residents can trust no one. Sonia’s assertion that, ‘there must be a few people who don’t steal, but no one knows’, suggests that everyone is a potential suspect, evidence of how inside casas tomadas, acts of home-making and relationships are characterized by mistrust, violence, and uncertainty.

These routine practices of remaining silent or not engaging in disputes should not be understood as passive responses to particular situations or conflicts. Instead, they are strategies that allow residents to ensure that they maintain access to resources and to minimize their own vulnerability and precarity. Inside the houses, women and their families focus on maintaining stable aspects of relationships with other residents while filtering out the more disruptive and problematic elements of living in a casa tomada. At the same time, the ways in which public and private spaces and activities overlap compel residents to constantly struggle to maintain and control their claims to spaces inside casas tomadas.

Women’s work

These experiences and the strategies in which residents of casas tomadas engage, in order to counter the conditions under which they live, take a particularly emotional toll on women’s sense of identity as mothers and caretakers and their ability to make a stable home space for their family. In many of my interviews, women were adamant in describing to me how they provide for their children in the face of such uncertainty and precarity, inside the daily context of casas tomadas and in the threat of eviction. Women often broke down crying as they described how they tried to care for their children despite the housing conditions and the constant threat of eviction.

Teresa, a single mother of a 7-year-old boy, would regularly speak about her son and what she does for him. When I first interviewed her, she was wearing a woolen hat to cover up the black roots of her hair. ‘Look at my hair’, she explained, ‘it looks so bad I have to wear a hat, but I don’t have any money to dye it’:

My son’s school comes first. I say to him, next month I’ll dye my hair when I have paid your tuition. I want my son to be someone in life! I’m not . . . my sisters also couldn’t be anything, but their sons are, you understand? Let me tell you, I have one son. I think about the security of my son. I am Peruvian and my son is Argentine. I think about my son and I wouldn’t like to think that he is in this situation (being evicted), that they come and throw us out as if we were criminals. I am no criminal, nor is my son and this is his country . . . I didn’t ask to be in this situation, not at all. I always paid for my room, always!

I interviewed Teresa three times and each time a sense of pride in what she does for her son and a sense of profound shame in her housing situation and her inability to provide more stability for him imbued our conversation. She was not alone. All of the women, I interviewed told their stories from their experiences and positions as mothers and caretakers, portraying a dual sense of shame about their situation and pride in their daily forms of resistance, and in the way they cared for their family. These discussions also revealed a profound self-questioning and exhaustion from the stress of trying to offer some semblance of home and stability for their children amidst chronic precarity and long-term uncertainty.

Thus, as Teresa’s story highlights, precarity is also experienced through the emotional exhaustion and shame of constantly struggling to provide a home space amidst extreme uncertainty and the inability to know what will happen in the future. Moving through various situations, events, encounters, and strategies at the micro-scales of routine acts and interactions inside casas tomadas demonstrates how chronic, long-term precarity becomes ubiquitous, destabilizing many, if not all, aspects of women and their family’s way of life and future prospects.